Donald Trump and Jorge Ramos: Who Was Right?

DUBUQUE, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump engaged in a prolonged confrontation with the anchor of the nation’s leading Spanish-language network during a news conference Tuesday, first having the well-known news personality removed before allowing him back in. Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and his followers may think that Jorge Ramos is just another loudmouth reporter trying to derail their campaign.As Trump continues to rise in the polls, voters who support him continually say they like the businessman because he speaks his mind, CBS2’s Mark Albert reported. “I’ve been a journalist for more than 30 years.In his role as the lead anchor of Univision’s nightly Spanish-language newscast and a series of English-and Spanish-language news and public affairs programs for nearly three decades, he regards his role as one part traditional journalist. Jorge Ramos, the Miami-based anchor for Univision, stood up and began to ask Trump about his immigration proposal, which includes ending automatic citizenship for infants born in the United States to parents in the country illegally.

But for millions of Hispanic viewers, the Univision anchor is the equivalent of a modern-day Tom Brokaw or Walter Cronkite: A trusted source of news and opinion, and quite possibly the most influential Spanish-speaking journalist in the world. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll released Aug. 3 showed a whopping 75% of Hispanics have a negative view of the Republican presidential front-runner. Ramos was bounced from a press conference by a security guard after he attempted to question Trump on his immigration policy – one criticized as extremist and ambiguous. “Go back to Univision,” Trump told Ramos in a reference to the Spanish-language TV network. But he would also say that, with the nation’s Latino population growing rapidly, the number of Latino elected officials nowhere near keeping pace and the fate of some 11.3 million undocumented immigrants — many of whom are Latino — now the primary issue in the 2016 election, he and the rest of the news staff at Univision must also play another role: They must embrace the work of social justice. Born and raised in Mexico, Ramos is the co-anchor for a top-rated news program on Univision called Noticiero Univision and the host of a Sunday morning political-news program on the Spanish-language network called Al Punto.

He’s suing the network because it pulled out of a contract to air Trump’s Miss America pageant after making controversial remarks about immigration. “He was making a bit of a speech more than he was asking a question, and he had not yet been called on so, Trump had some, some minor ground for trying to restore some decorum. In an incident that’s gotten widespread attention, Ramos, a Univision anchor, was ejected Tuesday from a Trump news conference before a rally in Dubuque, Iowa.

He also hosts an English-language program called America with Jorge Ramos, which is broadcast on Fusion, a channel that is co-owned by Univision and Disney/ABC. The Univision anchor’s influence is difficult to compare to that of other mainstream journalists, in part because Univision’s reach within the Hispanic market is unlike anything in the English-speaking media world. You weren’t called.” Trump has insulted Hispanics by saying, in his announcement speech in June, that Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems…They are bringing drugs. The network reaches 97% of Hispanic households in the U.S., according to Forbes, and its daily news program Noticiero pulls in an average 1.9 million viewers. For the nation’s English-only news audience, Ramos’s tangle with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump at a Tuesday-evening press conference in Iowa might have been their first encounter with the silver-haired Ramos.

Essentially Ramos, who has a reputation among those who watch and follow his work as a relentless pitbull of a questioner, came face to face with a candidate that’s known for pretty much the same. Ramos, who is 57, got his start on a 60 Minutes-style news program at Grupo Televisa’s flagship XEW-TV channel in Mexico City, but later quit his job after a story he worked on that was critical of Mexico’s government was censored by the station. In a campaign that seems to traffic in offensive remarks about nearly every broad voter constituency – women, veterans, immigrants – some of Trump’s most churlish commentary is about Latinos. Ramos has been an anchor on the network’s Noticiero news program since 1986, and has interviewed multiple U.S. presidents and foreign dignitaries, and reported on everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the war in Afghanistan. He has won eight Emmys for his TV journalism and has written eleven books, including one called “A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto.” Although Ramos may have as large a following as Cronkite or Brokaw, the Univision journalist is unlike them in one way: He is not afraid to express his opinion, and to take a stand on issues that affect his viewership, particularly the U.S. government’s approach to immigration and its treatment of Hispanic citizens.

The Trump-Ramos feud continued Wednesday morning, meanwhile, with Trump telling NBC News Ramos was “out of line” and “like a madman” at Tuesday’s news conference. He has confronted politicians like Ted Cruz, as well as and right-wing commentators such as Ann Coulter on his program, and has criticized Trump for his views. By the same measure, his closest competition at the bottom is the Texas senator Ted Cruz and former Texas governor Rick Perry, who both have a Latino favorability rating of negative 7%.

Ramos was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people earlier this year, and in her short profile of him, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour wrote: “Jorge Ramos is silver-haired and gray-eyed, but inside that ring of steel beats a heart of gold. Ramos wrangles with President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner; he swims the Rio Grande; he says he asks every question as if it’s his last, determined to get an answer or go down trying. Trump to sit down for an in-depth interview with Jorge to talk about the specifics of his proposals.” Trump also said he would offer a foreign policy proposal within the next month.

But he hinted at some of his thoughts during a free-wheeling rally in the Dubuque convention auditorium that followed the news conference. “We protect Germany for no money. In 2010, Ramos, ranked among the Latino leaders identified by Hispanic Americans in a Pew Research Center poll (a more recent 2013 Pew poll found that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Sen. This remark plays to the cliché that Latinos are hot-tempered and ignores the reality that Ramos was courteous (if dogged) in his line of questioning. And here’s the kicker: During more than a few critical ratings periods (known as “sweeps”) in recent years, Ramos’s nightly newscast has drawn bigger audiences than ABC, NBC, CBS and at points, even FOX’s nightly newscasts with the critical 18-to-49-year-old slice of the news-watching audience. (Those are the people that advertisers most want to reach.) And it stands its own with viewers overall in news and entertainment programming. He’s also an increasingly vocal supporter of immigration reform. “It’s a role that has helped him cross over into English-language news, but also blurred the line between journalist and activist,” writes Michael Miller of The Washington Post.

Do you know how many Hispanics are working for me?” he said. “They love me.” Aside from the obvious fact that working for someone does not necessarily equate to loving — let alone voting for — him, Trump is delusional. The interviews were largely unflinching, they were conducted in both Spanish and English with the aid of a supremely talented interpreter who kept the audience abreast of all that was said. Republican figures in Washington remain deeply worried about Trump’s effect on their efforts to woo Latino voters. “If I were in charge of Latino outreach for the RNC, I believe I would have watched the video last night and had an unhappy hour of about ten tall drinks,” writes left-leaning Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog. This summer, Donald Trump has combined his brand of unbridled self-confidence, political inexperience, hardline immigration policies (his policy calls for a temporary halt to all immigration and the deportation of all 11.3 million illegal migrants and their children) and lots of big, bad, bold, in-your-face talk about any number of issues to create what is apparently an appealing political campaign.

So, Ramos showed up at that Tuesday news conference determined to do what he thought necessary to get Trump to answer key questions about immigration for Univision’s audience. Consider that one prominent Latino polling firm has estimated that whoever the GOP nominee is, he or she will have to win over more Hispanic voters than ever before.

Whether he is denigrating the higher (Ramos) or the lower (“illegals”) among us, we all are aware of the ugly sentiments behind such comments and actions. The entertainment division of the network decided that it no longer wanted to do business with Trump, the pageant’s partial owner, after Trump described the people coming across the U.S., Mexico border as rapist and criminals during a speech in which Trump announced his plans to run for president.